"I own two pairs of [Vibram] FiveFingers because I want to be a year ahead of the athletes in terms of ancillary stuff ," Johnson says. Then he segues into Chris Solinsky and Solinsky's coach's secretiveness, then to Ryan Hall and Japanese racing flats, then to: "So I think, 'OK, the best runners in America aren't pushing the envelope on this.' I'd say the LetsRun chorus would say if you push the envelope you'll get faster. And my response is, 'No, if we get a navicular stress fracture in Renee's foot or Brent's foot I look like the biggest idiot out there. And not that it's about how I look, but if I'm [Nike exec] John Capriotti and Jay Johnson hurts two Nike athletes by wearing a non-Nike shoe, that's bad on a lot of levels."

Without a break, he moves on to Vaughn being in the wrong shoe five years ago (with the meta preview "and here I'm going to make a subtle dig at Brent's high school coach") to twisted ankles, a rock garden/sand pit he helped build at Vaughn's house, proprioception drills and on to how Vaughn's training partner James Carney makes pit stops during long runs, which gives Vaughn a chance to change shoes during the run. "We'll have Brent run in the Structure -- the Elite, the old Elite, not the Zoom or the Zoom Elite but not the new Lunar Glide Elite or whatever -- and then he'd switch to the Lunar Racer and get the last 8 miles in that. I mean, it's not that hard to get to 30 percent of your running in something really light." The answer concludes with "one final thing" about how Metivier Baillie is "closer to being bought into this because, if we're honest, her husband's going to make fun of her" because he runs 120 miles a week in racing shoes, and then "the last thing I'll say about this" being that Johnson is trying to switch to doing all of his running in racing shoes, but laziness and some foot pain and family commitments have left him a little overweight.

In Johnson's world, simple ain't easy; people have multiple simultaneous motives for the simplest act or statement; information wants to be free but also often gets shared with a "this is off the record" preface; it's normal to begin a response, "I'm going to answer two questions, one of which you didn't ask"; and, because of all that, running performance in 21st-century America is sometimes improved by doing just about anything but running.
For most of his career as a runner at Boulder's University of Colorado, Johnson didn't think about joining the profession of legendary CU coach Mark Wetmore. "Basically a kinesiology major" as an undergrad, Johnson passed the general admission exam for dentistry school. "My theory was to get entrenched in a mountain town and if it snowed a lot nobody would want to go see the dentist that day, so you could close down shop and go skiing," he says.

With bests of 3:49 for 1500m, 14:20 for 5,000m and 30:15 for 10,000m, Johnson was a solid but not All-American runner at CU. He was the sixth of the seven CU finishers at the 1998 NCAA cross country championships, a race won by teammate Adam Goucher to culminate the season portrayed in Chris Lear's book Running With the Buffaloes. By that time Johnson was a graduate student in kinesiology and applied physiology and knew he wanted to coach. Although to this day he cites Wetmore as his biggest coaching influence, even then the born questioner in Johnson wondered if there were a better way, given what seemed an extraordinarily high rate of injury on the team.

"I still sometimes think, 'How did we not get smarter by our fifth year?'" Johnson says. "That's the brilliance of Wetmore, where you create this culture where you're just going to run hard no matter what. The only negative to the CU culture is the Darwinian nature, the survival of the fittest. You can't do that unless you have a lot of talented guys. Like the other night I saw a documentary on snipers. If you're a sniper, you better use each bullet wisely. Wetmore's more like a guy with a pistol, where you just keep squeezing off shots."

A month after earning his masters in 2000, Johnson became the coach at Pratt Junior College in Kansas. "It was the only job I could get," he laughs. "Basically I tried to do everything we did at CU. This is off the record ... no wait, it's fine, this is on the record: That was a dumb mistake, but fortunately it didn't take me that long to figure it out." After two years at Pratt, Johnson returned to Boulder to become the middle-distance coach and recruiting coordinator under Wetmore at CU.

What started as a dream job eventually soured. "I went from fitting to not fitting because my job description when I was hired shifted out of my control," is Johnson's diplomatic way of saying that Wetmore's significant other had joined the coaching staff and unofficially assumed many of Johnson's on-paper responsibilities. Johnson resigned in 2008.

J

ohnson had already been doing work for Nike's running Web site and putting on summer running camps in Boulder for high-schoolers. With friend and Kansas State coach Mike Smith he started creating DVDs of the many non-running exercises both men believe are critical to elite success in modern times. And he continued to coach 2008 CU grad Sara Vaughn, an 800m/1500m runner wanting to compete post-collegiately.

"I only want to work with people I know I can make better," is Johnson's guiding principle on who he wants to coach. "I knew Sara could run a lot faster." A year after placing her pro fate in Johnson's hands, Vaughn had a stellar summer of 2009, PRing in 11 of 12 races to finish with bests of 2:03 for 800m and 4:11 for 1500m.

Dozens of top runners have yet to flock to Johnson. He now coaches Sara Vaughn's husband, Brent, who ran 13:18 for 5,000m in 2008 while at CU to set a school record. (That's faster in college than CU grads/ Olympians Goucher, Dathan Ritzenhein, Jorge Torres and Alan Culpepper did.) Metivier Baillie (pictured below), the 2010 national indoor 3,000m champion and also a CU grad, is his only other readily known runner. With two years of open coaching experience behind him, Johnson, age 34, now adds this qualifier: "For post-collegiates, I just want to work with adults. That doesn't mean you have to be married and be a parent like me, but if you're not an adult I'm not interested in working with you."

While Johnson hopes his group will grow -- and is creating a nonprofit to help support it -- he'll always work on a small scale. Training and the selling of it are too individualized in his mind to allow high quality with high numbers.

"To be a good coach you have to be able to communicate with humans," Johnson says. "And that's hard. If there are multiple types of humans ... Can I say something? Jay Johnson sucked as a JUCO coach for most JUCO kids. The kids I coached really well right away were middle-class white kids with good ACT scores. So my first coaching job, I couldn't coach anybody who wasn't me. The one thing I worry about not being a college coach right now is I'm not interacting with as many young people and having more opportunities to communicate well with them."

Good coaching, of course, requires more than successful psychology, even for someone as usually infectiously enthusiastic as Johnson. Despite his training and education, he isn't awed by certificates and credentials on paper.

"I have a slide for a talk I do at camp every year," he says. "It shows Dave Martin, Ph.D., Jack Daniels, Ph.D., and Arthur Lydiard. All three talk about VO2 max. Daniels talks about it in a 2-4 percent range. Martin widens it to a 10 percent range. Lydiard says, 'For best results train between 70 and 100 percent of aerobic ability.' That's an easy run to running really hard! Who's the guy who doesn't have the Ph.D.? The last guy. Who's the guy who's the best coach? The last guy. I know I offend thousands of people when I say Lydiard's a better coach than Daniels, but he is. You ask me about things like hormonal release and blood lactate. I just think that, even though I can't answer your questions as well as I'd like to sitting here, it doesn't bother me as much as it would have five years ago. Five years ago I would have left this and said, 'I've got to find out what millimole post-48 hours body squat blah blah blah.'"

A natural student, Johnson "steals" (his word) whatever he can from whomever he thinks is doing something that can help his runners. But some "macros" (his word again) are emerging.

"I want to coach athletes metabolically like Kenyans," he says. "Lots of progression runs, lots of hard runs, running shuffle-ly slow on easy days. This is probably the biggest difference I have with Wetmore. Whereas Wetmore told us, 'Hey, when Steve Prefontaine was fit, 6:00 pace was the slowest he ever ran,' I definitely disagree with that premise. I don't care if you're a 12:59 [5K] guy, I don't think you have to knock out 6:00 pace on every run.

"Biomechanically I'm trying to coach like Moroccans coach. I want perfect biomechanics certain times throughout the week, and I want to do things to make the body strong enough, supple enough, balanced enough to produce perfect biomechanics."

Still, says Johnson, "I don't think I've figured out the system that I want to employ. John Cook has a system. John Cook can coach long distance because the system is so strong, and Wetmore could coach long distance if he wanted to. I don't claim to have that system."

Johnson is fond of paraphrasing the poet Gary Snyder when discussing elements of his training methods. "I assume I'll still use the tool in 10-20 years," he says, "but I won't be surprised if I don't."

Johnson isn't Type A when he runs. On the South Boulder Creek Trail, there are a few cattle gates that require stopping to open and shut. While Brent Vaughn and others stop their watches for the 8 seconds the gate-tending requires, Johnson doesn't. Nor does he when Carney makes a pit stop. Johnson says that his mind prefers macro matters of big-picture thoughts and connections and associations, and that he has to force himself to cultivate what he calls "the anal Germanic side of the brain" to put training plans in an Excel sheet and keep on top of email and tend to details.

The claim can seem hard to rectify with some of Johnson's methods. One snowy afternoon last March, he posted on Twitter and Facebook that he would be shoveling the track at Boulder's Fairview High School, half an hour from his home in Denver. Johnson spent five hours shoveling. Vaughn's description of his training the next day reads, "10 miles with one mile of skipping and 5 x 120 and 2 x 150." (Translation: Almost entirely off the track.) Characteristically, Johnson offers several motivations for his act, including, "I like shoveling" and "I want to be the guy who shoveled the track" and "If you shovel the track the running gods will smile on you." Still, on that particular early spring afternoon he thought it vital that his runners -- training to peak in the summer -- spend a few minutes on the track the next morning to prepare their bodies for a real track session the morning after that.

The thing Johnson is most known for -- lots of non-running exercises -- can lend itself to this reading. On a typical day, Vaughn does at least 60 lunges (forward, sideways and backward) before his morning run. After the run comes one of what Johnson calls "general strength" routines, with Pilates-meets-high-school-football-practice activities like leg lifts and plank poses, simulated swimming and push-ups with a clap. There's often skipping in various directions and stepping over hurdles and kettlebell swings. After the hardest workouts of the week there are also medicine ball tosses and backward shot put throws. Before Vaughn's second run come more lunges, hip-mobility drills against a wall and five versions of skipping for 30 meters. After the run, more skipping and lateral shuffles with different arm swings for 50 meters at a stretch, then straight into a 10-minute general strength routine. If Vaughn has run for 50 minutes rather than 35 that afternoon, he's then to use his foam roller for four minutes. Not three, not five, but four. An hour before going to bed comes the Sleepytime routine, with more leg swings and leg lifts and simulated swimming, ending with four minutes on the foam roller.

Johnson doesn't accept that asking his athletes to do these routines daily can push the drive inherent in most elites over the edge. "The obsessive-compulsive nature of our sport says that always more running is good and always more hard running is good," he says. "I would argue that the infusion of the ancillary stuff gets them out of that mentality. I think Kenny Moore would have liked it because he would still get to work for another hour, and Bill Bowerman would have liked it because Moore's not running for another hour."

Kenny Moore didn't spend an hour a day on ancillary work before he placed fourth in the 1972 Olympic marathon, nor did his friend Frank Shorter, nor did Bill Rodgers.

Says Johnson, "How many Americans ran under 2:20 in the marathon 30 years ago? A couple hundred. Why didn't they have sacral and femoral stress fractures? I'm going to attribute 30 percent to an active childhood." (The other 70 percent he blames on overly built modern running shoes.) "What we're doing with the ancillary work is baby stuff . Peter Snell had more of this stuff in his life just from how he grew up -- it's just that the exercise we call 'Hay Bales' actually used to be hay bales! Isn't that interesting? The training that Peter Snell did, Americans at age 22 would break if they do that. We have to use med balls to simulate what an agrarian upbringing used to give you naturally.

"The most misunderstood thing about me," Johnson says excitedly, "is this: We do all this extra stuff just so we can run a lot and we can do some of the running hard. I consider this as something Brent does now at 25 to train like a madman when he's 29." Then he can't resist adding, " I want people to misunderstand what we're doing to a certain extent. How many times have you seen video of Brent Vaughn rocking a Sunday run?" (Zero.)

"You ask about hormonal release and things like that," he says. "I don't know what hormones are up-regulated from doing this stuff, and I sure as heck don't know genetically what genes are being transcribed. But I know it works.

"Think of this stuff like compost. Nobody really knows how compost works. They know there's microbes in there and they eat stuff, but really, it's magic. What's the ratio of brown to green? I don't know. I know I put in way too much green, I don't have enough leaves and I put in too much scraps. But still it works. I think with the ancillary stuff, if we do enough of it, if we do it in all three planes of motion, if we do it in a safe progression, we're going to get compost. I think I can coach really well if I pay attention to the human in front of me and I keep playing with compost."

From February through the next several months, the formerly injury-prone Vaughn averaged more than 100 miles a week, his most ever, while missing one day of training, and that to blisters. He ran 28:05 for 10,000m and 1:02:04 for the half marathon in his debut at the distances.

Johnson bristles at the suggestion that his coaching is unconventional. Watch elite Europeans and Ethiopians work out, he contends, and you'll see them doing many of the same things. Johnson also sometimes runs with a rock in each hand to test asymmetrical muscle-firing patterns, has Vaughn skip backwards downhill after a fast uphill stride, recommends lymphatic drain massage and has Vaughn do part of his cool-downs in bedroom slippers. "Carney asks me where my robe is," Vaughn says.

For an early May workout, Vaughn arrived at the Fairview High track at 8:30 and did his usual lunge warm-up, then jogged for a bit more than 20 minutes with Carney, Metivier Baillie and her husband, 2:19 marathoner and CU grad Austin Baillie. Drills and strides of the sort you definitely will see most elites do preceded four 2K repeats on the road, with Johnson alongside on a mountain bike. After a short jog back to the track, Vaughn did six 200s, intermittently skipping sideways during portions of the 200m recovery jog. He skipped some more and jogged a few laps in his slippers around the infield.

Then out came the kettlebells and medicine balls and shot puts. While Metivier Baillie heaved a shot behind her, Johnson yelled, "This is Shannon Rowbury power stuff!" Vaughn jogged five more laps in his slippers. Everyone did a series of exercises over hurdles. (Johnson has built hurdles out of PVC for some athletes.) "A typical day is walking over 120 hurdles," Johnson says. "I've been experimenting on myself with 160 hurdle clearances." Then Vaughn began a general strength routine on the infield.

"Imagine waking up at 6:00 and leaving the track at noon," Johnson says about how he structures a hard morning. "Picture a gradual incline, a plateau that's the hard running workout, then a gradual decrease in intensity, which is med ball, hurdles, to the last thing you do is hip-mobility stuff and then get in your car. For 5K/10K runners, I'll take that over you finish your workout and jog 5 miles."

At noon, Johnson left the track to drive back to Denver to take care of a family matter. Behind him Vaughn and the rest were still at it.

Training Notes From the CoachHere are a few of Jay Johnson's key coaching ideas.

1) Do ancillary work as a form of insurance.

Having a strong, supple, balanced body capable of general athleticism will increase your ability to train injury-free at a high level. Because of modern lifestyles, almost everyone needs to build that general strength through simple exercises to supply the athleticism that more active lifestyles used to impart naturally. For video demonstrations of several of Johnson's general strength routines, go to runningtimes.com/jjvideos.

2) Make the long run count.

"The long run can be hard," Johnson says. "I believe in a 21-mile run where you rock it between 14 and 20, and starting at about 8 or 9 it's not hard, but it's not easy." Vaughn regularly runs the fast stretch of his long runs between 5:10 and 5:30 pace on the rolling hills of Boulder's Magnolia Road at close to 9,000 feet of elevation; the sea level equivalent would be 10-15 seconds per mile slower than half marathon race pace. Vaughn runs long almost every Sunday, even though he's raced just one half marathon (a 1:02:04).

3) Make the intensity wave of your training huge.

Johnson thinks you get a much greater training stimulus by making your hard days extremely hard and your easy days easier than most runners think are worthwhile. Because you can run hard for only so long, that means piling on other work (the strength stuff ) soon after fast running. And it means emulating most Kenyans by doing true recovery runs, at least starting and sometimes finishing at little more than a shuffle, and not worrying about pace. Vaughn does much of his recovery running slower than 7:00 per mile, which is about 2:30 per mile slower than his 10K race pace. Really recovering means you'll be able to work that much harder on your harder days.

4) Believe.

At his camp for high-schoolers, the first slide of his first talk reads: "Every runner who has ever run fast trusts what they're doing."